Abruptly opened | 2 April 2008

I hit the last page of Fanny Burney’s Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, a gargantuan Oxford World Classics edition of over 900 pages, late last night. I started it a couple of weeks ago and zoomed through it with zeal. There is something about late 18th/19th century literature written by women* that can hold my interest in spite of all the bad bits.

I hypothesize that Burney kept a list (of about 900 pages) of various ways to torture a heroine and how the heroine would retain her high principles and in-born virtue through her sufferings and survive an even more highly-prized lady than before, and used each method in every novel. The anguish, which I myself rarely feel, is exhausting — pages devoted to arguments and extended fits of conscience, to tearful and agonized dialogue difficult to imagine sustained over scenes of such length. I was going to count how many times Cecilia believed and/or swore never to see Mortimer (Mortimer!) again but shortly thereafter did in fact see him — leading to countless variations upon “the door was abruptly opened by young Delvile!” — but then Cecilia went lunatic for a while and Mortimer just hung around in doorways weeping, so I gave it up.

I do not do Burney justice. She has crazy plots and too many coincidences and melodrama at every orifice, but she gently defies the conduct books and is actually quite hilarious and writes truly the most agonizingly real characters (the kind of people you long to clock upside the head) in spite of the language, and oh do I enjoy the death out of reading her.

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